In a recent interview Pianist Nada spoke about the process of transcribing Brahms’ organ chorales for piano:
“I have always loved the organ and even attempted playing it at a certain point. When I learned Brahms had written for the organ, I promptly looked over his works and ordered the music.
"Brahms very early on in his career turned his attention to the organ, and dreamed of becoming a virtuoso organist. He wrote some magnificent pieces.
"The 11 chorales were his last works and it is quite revealing that he turned back to a form of music at the end of his life that was reserved and meditative as well as to the organ as its vehicle.
“I am sure Brahms sat at the piano himself to conceive these chorales and imagined the sound to be an organ.”
“The chorales are meant to be a prayer to the ‘after life.’ Some of those may well have been written when he was already suffering from the early stages of his terminal disease.
“The greatest challenge was to give a dimension to each piece (especially while lacking a pedal keyboard), as well as making the notes of the chorales as clear as possible in the texture of the music.
“I do not consider these 11 chorales to be part of his solo piano catalog. They are part of his organ repertoire. I adapted them to the piano in the tradition of pianists who have been attracted to organ repertoire and attempted transcriptions of Bach, for example, who composed 371 chorales. Again, these are not arrangements. I did not want to alter Brahms’ language in any way.”
